On this day in
1945 the United States demonstrated that it was as morally bankrupt as
the Nazi machine it had recently vanquished and the Soviet regime with
which it was allied. Over Hiroshima, and three days later over Nagasaki,
it exploded an atomic device that was the most efficient weapon of
genocide in human history. The blast killed tens of thousands of men,
women and children. It was an act of mass annihilation that was
strategically and militarily indefensible. The Japanese had been on the
verge of surrender. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military significance.
It was a war crime for which no one was ever tried. The explosions,
which marked the culmination of three centuries of physics, signaled the
ascendancy of the technician and scientist as our most potent agents of
death.

- Advertisement -

"In World War II Auschwitz and Hiroshima showed that progress through
technology has escalated man's destructive impulses into more precise
and incredibly more devastating form," Bruno Bettelheim
said. "The concentration camps with their gas chambers, the first
atomic bomb ... confronted us with the stark reality of overwhelming
death, not so much one's own -- this each of us has to face sooner or
later, and however uneasily, most of us manage not to be overpowered by
our fear of it -- but the unnecessary and untimely death of millions. ...
Progress not only failed to preserve life but it deprived millions of
their lives more effectively than had ever been possible before. Whether
we choose to recognize it or not, after the second World War Auschwitz
and Hiroshima became monuments to the incredible devastation man and
technology together bring about."

The atomic blasts, ignited in large part to send a message to the
Soviet Union, were a reminder that science is morally neutral. Science
and technology serve the ambitions of humankind. And few in the sciences
look beyond the narrow tasks handed to them by corporations or
government. They employ their dark arts, often blind to the
consequences, to cement into place systems of security and surveillance,
as well as systems of environmental destruction, that will result in
collective enslavement and mass extermination. As we veer toward
environmental collapse we will have to pit ourselves against many of
these experts, scientists and technicians whose loyalty is to
institutions that profit from exploitation and death.

Scientists and technicians in the United States over the last five
decades built 70,000 nuclear weapons at a cost of $5.5 trillion. (The
Soviet Union had a nuclear arsenal of similar capability.) By 1963,
according to the Columbia University professor Seymour Melman,
the United States could overkill the 140 principal cities in the Soviet
Union more than 78 times. Yet we went on manufacturing nuclear
warheads. And those who publicly questioned the rationality of the
massive nuclear buildup, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who at the
government lab at Los Alamos, N.M., had overseen the building of the two
bombs used on Japan, often were zealously persecuted on suspicion of
being communists or communist sympathizers. It was a war plan that
called for a calculated act of enormous, criminal genocide. We built
more and more bombs with the sole purpose of killing hundreds of
millions of people. And those who built them, with few exceptions, never
gave a thought to their suicidal creations.

- Advertisement -

"What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded
ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able
to talk about the prospect of killing almost everyone except in
prudential and game-theoretical terms?" Oppenheimer asked after World
War II.

Max Born,
the great German-British physicist and mathematician who was
instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics, in his memoirs
made it clear he disapproved of Oppenheimer and the other physicists who
built the atomic bombs. "It is satisfying to have had such clever and
efficient pupils," Born wrote, "but I wish they had shown less
cleverness and more wisdom." Oppenheimer wrote his old teacher back.
"Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much
that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is
a sentiment that I share." But of course, by then, it was too late.

It was science, industry and technology that made possible the 20th
century's industrial killing. These forces magnified innate human
barbarity. They served the immoral. And there are numerous scientists
who continue to work in labs across the country on weapons systems that
have the capacity to exterminate millions of human beings. Is this a
"rational" enterprise? Is it moral? Does it advance the human species?
Does it protect life?

For many of us, science has supplanted religion. We harbor a naive
faith in the godlike power of science. Since scientific knowledge is
cumulative, albeit morally neutral, it gives the illusion that human
history and human progress also are cumulative. Science is for us what
totems and spells were for our premodern ancestors. It is magical
thinking. It feeds our hubris and sense of divine empowerment. And
trusting in its fearsome power will mean our extinction.

The 17th century Enlightenment myth of human advancement through
science, reason and rationality should have been obliterated forever by
the slaughter of World War I. Europeans watched the collective suicide
of a generation. The darker visions of human nature embodied in the
works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and
Frederick Nietzsche before the war found modern expression in the work
of Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, D.H.
Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Samuel Beckett, along with atonal and
dissonant composers such as Igor Stravinsky and painters such as Otto
Dix, George Grosz, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Human progress,
these artists and writers understood, was a joke. But there were many
more who enthusiastically embraced new utopian visions of progress and
glory peddled by fascists and communists. These belief systems defied
reality. They fetishized death. They sought unattainable utopias through
violence. And empowered by science and technology, they killed
millions.

Human motives often are irrational and, as Freud pointed out, contain
powerful yearnings for death and self-immolation. Science and
technology have empowered and amplified the ancient lusts for war,
violence and death. Knowledge did not free humankind from barbarism. The
civilized veneer only masked the dark, inchoate longings that plague
all human societies, including our own. Freud feared the destructive
power of these urges. He warned in "Civilization and Its Discontents"
that if we could not regulate or contain these urges, human beings
would, as the Stoics predicted, consume themselves in a vast
conflagration. The future of the human race depends on naming and
controlling these urges. To pretend they do not exist is to fall into
self-delusion.

- Advertisement -

The breakdown of social and political control during periods of
political and economic turmoil allows these urges to reign supreme. Our
first inclination, Freud noted correctly, is not to love one another as
brothers or sisters but to "satisfy [our] aggressiveness on [our fellow
human being], to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to
use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to
humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him." The war
in Bosnia, with rampaging Serbian militias, rape camps, torture centers,
concentration camps, razed villages and mass executions, was one of
numerous examples of Freud's wisdom. At best, Freud knew, we can learn
to live with, regulate and control our inner tensions and conflicts. The
structure of civilized societies would always be fraught with this
inner tension, he wrote, because "... man's natural aggressive instinct,
the hostility of each against all and of all against each, opposes this
program of civilization." The burden of civilization is worth it. The
alternative, as Freud knew, is self-destruction.

A rational world, a world that will protect the ecosystem and build
economies that learn to distribute wealth rather than allow a rapacious
elite to hoard it, will never be handed to us by the scientists and
technicians. Nearly all of them work for the enemy. Mary Shelley warned
us about becoming Prometheus as we seek to defy fate and the gods in
order to master life and death. Her Victor Frankenstein, when his
8-foot-tall creation made partly of body pieces from graves came to
ghastly life, had the same reaction as Oppenheimer when the American
scientist discovered that his bomb had incinerated Japanese
schoolchildren. The scientist Victor Frankenstein watched the "dull
yellow eye" of his creature open and "breathless horror and disgust
filled his heart." Oppenheimer said after the first atomic bomb was
detonated in the New Mexican desert: "I remembered the line from the
Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the
Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his
multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, in one way or another." The
critic Harold Bloom, in words that could be applied to Oppenheimer, called Victor Frankenstein "a moral idiot."

All attempts to control the universe, to play God, to become the
arbiters of life and death, have been carried out by moral idiots. They
will relentlessly push forward, exploiting and pillaging, perfecting
their terrible tools of technology and science, until their creation
destroys them and us. They make the nuclear bombs. They extract oil from
the tar sands. They turn the Appalachians into a wasteland to extract
coal. They serve the evils of globalism and finance. They run the fossil
fuel industry. They flood the atmosphere with carbon emissions, doom
the seas, melt the polar ice caps, unleash the droughts and floods, the
heat waves, the freak storms and hurricanes.

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.